What You Need to Know About YouTube Music

Music streaming has remarkably gained momentum over the last couple of years. Presently, there are many services that have dominated the scene of on-demand music playback. Services such as Spotify, Apple Music, Pandora, Deezer, and many more have been there for quite a while. But there is a new entrant in the game that is powerful enough to give stiff competition to all the other services. Yes, you guessed it right; it is none other than YouTube Music.

YouTube is the king of video streaming, and now the company is eyeing obtaining the same position in music streaming as well. It is almost unbeatable as all the artists prefer YouTube more than any other service as it gives them the power to reach one billion-plus listeners instantly. Now, compare that to Spotify that has a 75 million user base or Apple Music with just 15 million. Also, we have never seen any artist removing his/her songs from YouTube. We all remember the fight between Apple Music and Taylor Swift, don’t we? Well, that has never been the case with YouTube. That’s where the advantage of YouTube Music can be felt. Moreover, YouTube has the widest collection of music, covers, parodies, lyrics videos, and what not.

Now with the launch of a standalone YouTube Music app, it has forayed into the business of pure music. We have listed a few features that have come with the new app.

Right from its first day, the YouTube Music app was available on both iOS and Android platforms in the US. Sowmya Subramanian, an engineering director at YouTube, explained it in simpler terms:

It’s the culmination of everything YouTube learned from launching Music Key, its beta music subscription service, last year.

(That service was only available to heavy music listeners identified by YouTube.)

Customization

YouTube Music is all about customization. Right from the home page itself, which has three segments: “My Station” and the other two elements are music genres that are based on users’ music taste or listening exemplars, such as pop and rock. The customization is done well, and other elements are also carefully designed and based on what the users likes, taking a major chunk of information from YouTube’s algorithm and browsing history.

Trending Tab and YouTube Red

Another cool feature onboard is the “Trending Tab,” which features playlists like “The Daily 40” or “On the Rise,” largely handpicked from the YouTube community. For all those who just want to listen to the music and don’t really care about its video, there is “YouTube Red.” It is a subscription-based service that allows users to minimise the app to audio only, which means that the video can be played in the background without disturbing the audio. It also offers audio only offline – the same can be done for videos, but that will suck a considerable amount of data. YouTube Red also blocks advertisements and enables offline viewing.

Offline Mixtape

The next feature on the list is known as the “offline mixtape.” It is limited to YouTube Red subscribers. The user will be required to tell the app how much space he/she can grant, and on the basis of storage availability and users’ likes, the app will create a mixtape. It also refreshes the mixtape every day.

What YouTube Music needs to work on

One major shortcoming in the app is that it does not allow users to create their own playlist. They are limited to liking videos and starring them. Also, there is a fair chance that the app might end up playing low-quality versions of the song rather than the original high quality that is provided on other streaming services.

Saying all that, YouTube might not be as perfect as we thought, but it is certainly the winner in the game of video streaming services. Having an enormous user base, its standalone music streaming app is destined to attract many audiophiles.